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The New Cosmos Series

A couple of years ago it was announced that there would be a new Cosmos series, patterned after the 1980 series by Carl Sagan, this time featuring Neil deGrasse Tyson. I’m on record as being a huge fan of the original series — I would say that it’s one of the most influential TV series in my own personal history — and the new series was going to have Ann Druyan, Sagan’s wife, as a producer, so I was reasonably certain that the new version would stick to the basic concept of the original, gussied up with current effects and such. So I was looking forward it when it showed up.

The first episode aired last night on Fox (which is significant in itself — an unabashedly pro-science documentary show on commercial network TV? Even the original series could only manage PBS), and I have to say I was pretty…